UNISEX - "Hold Your Breath... and Then Some" 1993-1995

UNISEX was one of the earliest punk rock bands in Ottumwa, existing long enough to record only one demo and featured future members of Forced Expression and Captain Three Leg. We wanted to be Poison Idea, fell way short of doing so due to none of us really knowing how to play. Instead we created our own brand of silly, short song HC with a crazed singer who sounded like he was going to break a blood vessel in his head at any time. 56 track discography with everything we ever recorded. Below are the liner notes I wrote for the CDR reissue...

"UNISEX existed for about a month during the summer of 1993. Mike was going off to college at UNI and a month was all we had. BEEF STEW disbanded and somehow Brian and Spence started playing with Mike and I. The idea was to write as many songs as we could in what little time we had, go to a studio to record them and then release a cassette. The magic number ended up being 20. 20 songs were written and rehearsed in front of my brother’s dumb drunken friends in our garage on no sleep.

July 13th, 1993…. I vividly remember Chris Hunter, engineer at Studio 16 Productions, trying to hide his face so we wouldn’t see him laughing at our half-assed attempt at “music”. This was my first time in a studio. We set up, sound checked, recorded and mixed down in just under two hours. $70 was our total bill, $70 well spent. Mike’s paper thin guitar sound and Brian’s lack of cymbals (they were there, just didn’t get recorded?) stamped our demo with an odd sound, but it was what it was and there was no time or money to do it over again.

100 copies of our “demo” were sold, some packaged as part of the “Unisex Sack Lunch Boxed Set” in a brown paper bag with a packet of Kool-Aid, hot chocolate, two crayons, a sheet of Unisex stickers, moist towelette and a swell poster of our then mayor for the kiddies to hang on their wall. Once the 100th copy was sold, I deemed “Hold Your Breath” as having gone Tin Foil. A year later(somewhere between September 1 and 6, 1994) we got back together and re-recorded the songs in Mike’s basement and repackaged them with the studio recording as a second “pressing” of 50 copies.

One last hurrah, on April 5th, 1995, we got back together and recorded 2 new songs for Mike’s “This Is a Tiny Town” compilation. This was the last time we played together as Unisex and the last time I played with Mike. Brian, Spence and I would continue with other projects, but that’s another story, and another disc…."

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